Bear Grease - Ep. 483: This Country Life - First the Bear, Then the Bite

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Brent’s still in the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan, where a filled bear tag opens up the door for an unforgettable fishing adventure. Look out! This country boy has a fly rod and he’s not afraid to use it. Bring your safety glasses, we’re going fishing on MeatEater’s “This Country Life” podcast. Thank you to our sponsors, Case Knives and Stor-Mor. Shop This Country Life Merch Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and Just General Country Living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Storemore Studio on Meat Eat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share.

First the bear, then the bite. We're still in Saskatchewan, and we've got a bear in the bag. Now it's time to fish. Join me at the fire. Let's get started. I've described Saskatchewan Canada as one of my most favorite places on earth, and it's true. My first introduction was a decade ago with the mule skinner himself, Clay Newcomb. I was up there following him around with a camera.

long before either of us went to work for meat eater. Him obviously being there longer than me. But the first trip there for me was important because it was the one that got me hooked. That was the infamous five-and-a-half-hour boat ride apparel. 55 miles. I think that's like six million kilometers on the dog sled. Just not sure what the exchange rate is to watercraft. Anyway, Clay and the boat he was in beat us to the bank by a few minutes.

And when I got there, Playboat was standing on the end of the dock, grinning like a baked possum, offered me a hand out of the boat and on to Terra Firma. As I took his hand and stepped up beside him, I quoted my favorite line from Gordon Lightfoot's wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I'd had that song playing over and over in my head from the time we left the bank until mercifully coasting up to the dock where my hillbilly buddy was waiting to get my reaction to the start of our. big adventure together. For anyone wondering, I did the math. Fifty times from start to finish. You can listen to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald 50 times in five and a half hours.

But as I stepped up beside him, I said with the joy of still being alive, does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? Clay looked at me with the most astonished expression and said, did you just make that up? We saw a lot of bears on that trip, a lot of big ones too, and I got my first glimpse of the northern lights. It never really got dark, but late one night we were outside by the fire and saw them. They looked more like a little wistful colored smoke than what I would eventually see almost a decade later.

Regardless, when the bear tags were filled, we all started fishing. and that gave the cameraman the first opportunity to participate in the action rather than just observing it from behind the lens. We caught Northern Pike by the boatloads, mostly on yellow painted spoon with five red diamonds painted on one side like a playing card, towing a treble hook. I would learn that the regard for that bait up there is second only to Gordon Lightfoot himself. Mr. Lynn Thompson started churning out that. iconic bait back in 1951 in Abernathy, Saskatchewan. And for the last 75 years, it's been handing out

sore lips all over the continent. Gordon Lightfoot was 13 when the first one rolled off the production line, and as of last count, they've made more than 55 million. Gordon has sold 10 million albums. Both are treasured Canadian originals, worthy of their lofty status. But it is a The spinning reel fishing for Big Pike was something to behold, I couldn't imagine what fly fishing for them would be. Now, that was back when I was getting into fly fishing, and with every turn of the handle on that spinning reel, I longed for it to be me stripping a big single-hook streamer over an ambush point where a pike was waiting to smash it with a violent take. That opportunity came this month on the bear hunt with Dante Tobacco. at Pilots Lodge that I talked about last week.

You never know how these hunts will go. You're dependent on a lot of things that you have no control over like the weather and the animals. But we tried to prepare for each scenario however it played out. Bear hunting was priority number one. If that turned out to be a struggle, then the secondary story to the project

would be how tough the hunting was with the primary remaining me going to be from behind the camera to in front of it. Now, if we tagged a bear before the time came for us to leave, we'd use what was left to fill out the story and fish, flyfish. We'd be targeting the big ones that patrol the cold waters of the Fondalock in bays where they patrolled in a constant search for food. Before leaving on this trip, I googled Northern Pike in Saskatchewan,

The area where I was going was in the first four destination areas to find them. I felt good about my chances of getting an opportunity if the bear hunting worked out. If you listened last week, you already know that on day three, I filled my bear tag. If you haven't listened yet, spoiler alert, on day three, I may or may not have filled my bear tag. You'll just have to go and listen. But I talked at length to Dante, one of the owners of the owners of the, the pilot's lodge where we were staying about fly fishing there and whether I needed to tie any flies, what size fly rod I needed to bring with me, and he assured me that he had everything I needed.

I was nervous about dependent on someone. I didn't know having the equipment I was used to using, but space was at a premium on the float plane flying in, and between my bag and Bowcase and Dave Gardner's bag and camera equipment, we were having to count and divvy up the weight a lot of between all our gear. Since fly fishing wasn't either of the top two priorities to capture with the camera, I deferred to Dante's judgment and didn't bring anything. And it was the right decision. It was late when we finally called it quits on the day I got my bear.

The next morning we spent skinning the bear and getting the bear meat squared away, some of which we were going to have for supper that night. Then when all the chores were done, we loaded up in the boats and headed up river to the same bay where I'd gotten my bear the evening before. There was a bald eagle nest on the cliff face, about 20 feet above the water in a series of rapids. We went by them. We could see two fuzzy little eglets staring at us as we shot up the rapids in Dante's boat pushed by his new jet foot outboard. The fly rod Dante had weighting on me was a 9 foot 10 weight. The same length that I was used to casting, but twice as heavy.

If you're not familiar with what that means, check this out. Fly rod weights range from 1 to 15 plus and indicate the size of the fly line the rod is designed to cast. The rod and line must match for the rod to bend over or properly low. as they say. A higher number means it's a stiffer and a heavy rod built for larger flies and fish. In Arkansas when I'm trout fishing I typically

use a five-weight rod. Smaller number, smaller lion and flies. Coincidentally, that's the same size fly rod I grew up fishing for brim with my dad. But a rod of that size could potentially get wrecked by the fish that

inhabit the trophy class fishery in northern Saskatchew. Dante asked me if I knew how to double haul when casting. I told him in my mind I was a pro at it, but in reality, I could possibly kill someone with my erratic and out-of-rhythm false casting that looked more like a sword fight in a swarm of yellow jackets than he did fishing. I watched him and Nick Goss, another guy in Campton I told you about last week. They were standing at the end of the dock,

and I watched him send a pike fly the size of a small child effortlessly through the air with a minimum of effort and a maximum of accuracy using the double-haul method. There's a ton of how-to videos on the University of YouTube, but I learned it while watching two childhood friends from Lloyd Saskatchewan putting on a clinic at the dock beside what I like to call Fort Fondalot, our remote wilderness outpost. I was thinking about what I saw them doing when Dante killed the engine and we could coasted into the middle of that bay. The same bay where the evening before,

we'd given a beautiful cinnamon-colored black bearer a ride back to the fore. I was handed a hearty fly rod designed by the folks over in England who've been making them for the last 150 years. It was the first one I'd ever held in my hand. It was awful pretty to look at, and it had a matching reel with a turquoise-colored fly line. I spooled out some line and started false casting

and feeding the coils of line that had gathered at my feet as the weight of the line forward and backward pushed that red and yellow fly further and further toward my target. The first cast landed surprisingly where I had intended it to. I had initially been hopeful just to get it out of the boat

and into the water reasonably close to where the fish were. I was more than proud of the results of my first attempt. I repeated the process, gaining confidence, along with distance on each successive attempt. They didn't all look like what Dante and Nick had demonstrated, but a lot of them did. And with Dave filming and running his camera from Nick's boat, less than a dozen cast in, I hooked something big. I'd been instructed to strip set the hook, which is the counterintuitive to every other method of catching a fish I've ever been taught. Brim, bass, croppy catfish and trout.

When you get a bite, you try to put them on the bank with a big upward pull, forcing the rod tip way above your head and burying that hook in the fish. Well, with the strip set, it's just an extended version of stripping the bait to entice a bite for whatever you're fishing for. When pikes are the target, it usually doesn't take much coaxing to get them chom. They're always hunting for something to eat. eat. Nick, Nick explained it to me this way. The water may look calm and nice on the top, but beneath the surface, it's the Wild Wild West 24-7. It's full of predatory fish, and nothing is safe.

I don't know how many cast it took, but I had been fishing for less than 15 minutes when I saw the pike hit the fly and swirl to leave as I stripped at the hook as hard as I could. I stripped it twice in a row and held the slack firm as I went to the reel and cranked in the loose line coiled around my feet as fast as I could while maintaining pressure on what I thought was a pretty big fish. He made a couple of runs peeling line off the reel as the drag sang out loud that whatever was on the other end of my line had no intention to give it up easy. Two or three runs later, I was holding a 43-inch version of Esox Lucius. The northern pike.

Anything 40 inches and above is considered a trophy class pike and estimated to be beyond 15 years old. I had just landed one three inches beyond that mark, the first specimen of such on a fly rod. We got our photos and released her back into the cold water to rest, recover, and resume what she was built to do. The feeling of seeing that fish swim away unscathed after the fight was just as satisfying as landing it. A fished for a while longer, and as we worked our way back toward the river, I hung another one. My casting had improved, and I was way more comfortable on the second hookup than I was on the first. That was the biggest fish of the day, and the longest freshwater fish of my life. a massive dinosaur of a pike that measured 46 inches.

It'd be pretty hard to top that one, so we called it a day and made our way back to camp, filming different scenic things along the way. The next day, we fished for walleye, and in the span of less than hour, we had more than enough to feed the five of us. The rest we caught that afternoon received a pass and we returned to the chilly depths of the river.

Our trip was now nearing the end, and with our departure, Fort Fondalock would be boarded up and secured. A few months will pass before Dante and his crew return to guide other folks on the quest for big fish and bull moose. But along the river, between the camp buildings, the day-to-day activity will continue, just as it has for the last 10,000 years following the retreat of the last glaciers that formed this wilderness mecca. A place that's been home to bear moose and the denesaline people for just as long. I don't know when I'll get to physically return to northern Canada, but since I've come home,

catch myself going back whenever my mind gets idle or something subliminally reminds me of it. And for a moment, I can feel the air that has never been breathed before. I can see the wildlife that no one has seen before. in a place with the oldest exposed bedrock on earth. And for that moment, I'm right back there among the newest, oldest things. Thank you so much for letting me taking you fishing with me north of the border. Next week, we're heading south of the border, the border of Arkansas. We'll be fishing for a flathead catfish on the Washtaw River in Louisiana with my good friend Bradley Smith,

the man behind the YouTube channel, God's Country. hunting and fishing. Well, I'm sure you probably heard, I hope you have, the Bear Grease overalls launched yesterday. If you fancy yourself a pair, you might want to get over to themeat eater.com and get them order. Thank y'all so much for listening to all of us here on the Bear Grease channel. That includes Claybow, the professor, and yours truly.

Until next week, this is Brent Reeves, signing off. Y'all be careful.